This invention relates to providing systems for improving medical safety in the area of intravenous drug administration. More particularly, this invention relates to hand-held electronic medical systems adapted to assist health care professionals quickly and efficiently calculate dosages and infusion rates for commonly administered drugs, especially emergency drugs. The system is also circumstantially adaptable to non-emergency drug administration procedures.
Intravenous drugs are commonly infused in critical care situations such as during a cardiopulmonary resuscitation or trauma stabilization where resuscitative drugs are administered as a life-saving measure. Such drugs may preferably include: Isoproterenol, Lidocaine Hydrochloride, Procanamide Hydrochloride, Phenylephrine Hydrochloride, Sodium Nitropusside, Dilitiazem Hydrochloride, Dobutamine Hydrochloride, Dopamine Hydrochloride, Norepincphrine, Heparin Sodium, Insulin Regular, Adrenaline, Lidocaine and Nitroglycerine. The safe and efficacious (typically intravenous at present) administration of such drugs is often dependent upon physical factors such as age and weight of the patient. Each drug infusion rate calculation is therefore generally dependent on a number of patient factors.
Conventionally, medical professionals are required to recall the formulas applicable to each category of drug, to determine the weight of the patient, and to manually calculate proper dosage (i.e., drip rate) based upon the parameters prescribed by the attending physician, the drug prescribed, volume of intravenous fluid, and other critical parameters. A particular problem which arises with manual calculations is that, quite often, a medical professional in critical care situation is operating within a dynamic and highly stressful environment where speed in infusing the patient is vital in achieving a satisfactory outcome.
An example of a common method of determining drip rates is expressed in the following equation:D*BW*60=C*R 
The variables for this equation are defined as follows:                D=Dosage Rate (mg/ml, units/ml, ug/kg/min)        BW=Body Weight expressed in kilograms (kg)        C=Concentration of infusion expressed in mg/ml or units/ml        R=Rate of infusion expressed in milliliters per hour (ml/hr)        60=Constant (60 minutes per hour)        
The representative equation includes five variables requiring that a series of calculations be performed each time a drug is prepared and used.
Medical professionals are often required to rely upon their memory to recall safe dose ranges for drugs being administered during an emergency procedure. Often, a medical professional is required to manually perform the entire sequence of the calculation, relying on the knowledge of the prescribing physician as to safe drug dose ranges. In complex cases, a medical professional may stop to reconfirm the proper administration by consulting a printed medical manual, infusion “cheat sheet”, or incompatibility chart. This procedure can be excessively time consuming, especially in emergency and intensive-care environments.
Unfortunately, the urgency with which such calculations must take place can sometimes result in errors. Furthermore, multiple drugs are often administered simultaneously to a given patient. Some drugs are not compatible for infusion. The medical professional must immediately identify whether a first administered drug is compatible or incompatible with one or more other drugs to be administered. Again, medical professionals are often required to commit to memory the compatibility status of drugs, and thus less-than-perfect memory endangers the welfare of the patient.
Further compounding the above-described problems is the trend toward an increasing number of pediatric patients being treated in normally adult medical facilities. In these situations, the medical professional must quickly adjust the drug administration parameters to match the needs of the pediatric patient.
Clearly, a need exists within emergency and intensive-care environments for a system adapted to quickly and efficiently provide appropriate drug infusion rate calculations and interaction data to medical professionals, thus increasing the likelihood of a successful medical outcome. Similar issues sometimes exist in the administration of non-emergency drugs.